


similar motion (the clockwork in your core remix)

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-21
Updated: 2013-03-21
Packaged: 2017-12-05 23:24:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/729092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The game does not discard them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	similar motion (the clockwork in your core remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anthrop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/gifts).
  * Inspired by [if it dont speak in tongue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/448306) by [anthrop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/pseuds/anthrop). 



He's every Dave that ever died; he's in a bright green suit with blood down the front, there's a planet coming together out of cosmic dust around a faint little sun, and he's not alone. "You too, huh," he says. "You and me, time players at the beginning of--stuff." 

His throat itches. He raises a hand to scratch it, and his fingers keep going until he feels his own spine. He pulls them away. Aradia's robot body is charred black, but the eyes are still white, and she stares, waiting for him to freak out or fuck up. Finally, she says, in the flat, distorted monotone of a broken voice chip, "We can skip this part. We're just here to watch." 

Aradia spins a dial on her music box and drags him a hundred million years in the future--really drags him, like a hand reaching into his gut and _yanking,_ not even a bit like his time power. When he gets over it the planet has an atmosphere clouded over with volcanic ash. "Like that," Aradia says. "It wouldn't happen, without our watching. The others will show up when there are people to believe in them." 

"How do you know?"

"I have no idea. I'm making it up," she says, "but it can't be just us, can it?"

"We're not gods," he says. 

"We could have been consumed in the making of the universe, while our--" The voice chip, incapable of trailing off, cuts out. She turns her head to look at him again. If the vocals are messed up there's a good chance the eyes are, too. If she was corporeal, her wiring would have been fried. Suspended in the moment of death--stuffed like a couple of safari trophies--it doesn't matter. Whatever is keeping them afloat in vacuum and pricking him with the urge to be another dead Dave, drowned Dave, missing armed Dave, hung by the feet from a tree and left to starve Dave, is keeping him from being too worried about it. 

"Real selves," a drowned Dave finishes for her. His neck is intact; his lungs are full of water. It's a freaky sensation, but it's better than having a cut throat. He bets he could pound his chest and spit up if he wasn't in the middle of a conversation. "The ones who won the game."

"While our real selves go on to the ultimate reward. I'm going to keep watch," Aradia says. She has flesh now, and wires under her skin, too, and a thick rope of them coming out of the back of her neck and draped over her shoulder. "You can stay with me, if you want."

"I'm going to skip," Dave says. She shrugs twice, then a third time, the wires swaying with the motion.

He finds Rose: she's given the people writing, and taught them to make decisions that affect other people and keep them out of the loop.

He finds Jade: when the world moves past its gods, she whispers algorithms in the ears of scientists and children. The forests she calls her own never get cut down. 

He finds John: up the clouds, listening for the prayers of lost sailors, shifting the winds for them.

He appears before the dying and holds their hands while they slip away: if he can appear in every moment at once, without even thinking about it and without making himself a herd of paradoxen to deal with, he might as well do _something_ useful with it.

-

She watches black holes consume their neighbours. In galactic cores, where the stars are dense enough to touch and old enough to die, she watches the old red giants wink out one after another, until the entire galaxy goes quiet and still. It wouldn't happen if she wasn't here to watch it, so she watches.

But there's a point where Aradia's view of the timeline narrows and shrinks to a single point. For that moment, there's no strand but her, and nothing she intersects but Dave. There are still laws she has to follow. Omniscience doesn't make it any less grating, but early obedience to the whims of ghosts does. Why should a new universe be any different than the last? There is not one of her aspects that remembers being alive, and a most of them didn't know their own names at the moment of their deaths. 

"Fuck, that's momentous," Dave says. Their timelines meet over a vast, hot nebula. Two blue giants shed their outer layers within ten thousand years of one another: if the two of them are gods of time they're gods of coincidence, too, and this is perfect. 

"They'll be short-lived," Aradia says. 

"So, yeah." In this aspect, Dave is missing an eye. He keeps one hand on the turntable on his blind side, as though he's afraid it will blow away some solar wind. "Whenever you're sick of playing cosmic observer, I know a little culture with a lot of good booze, blame Rose, and as it turns out, hell yes, we _can_ get drunk. You should give it a shot. It takes the edge off a long day guiding the dead to their deaths."

"Is that what we do," she says. 

"I bet you don't spend all day, 'day' being meaningless for you and me, but you know what I mean--I bet you don't spend all that time you've got watching baby stars get born."

Aradia shoves them into the future, to the point where the first stars are forming, so she can watch Dave wince. "I'm fine," she says, "I'm really fine."

"Found any life out here?"

"No."

"Had any visitors?"

"No."

"The rest of the trolls are on-planet, too," he says. "That justice system likes big, nasty show trials way too much for a bunch of Terezis in one Terezi to not have had a hand in it."

"No," Aradia says. 

"And, I mean, if we haven't found them yet it's because--actually, I have no clue. But you and me were meant to meet."

"You can't use causality on me."

"Who said I'm using anything on you?

"You can't be at all their sides," she says, "not any more than I can watch every star die. I bet it was easy at first, but you're getting worn out because you try too much, and you care too much."

"Sure." Dave thumbs at his empty eye socket, then grabs for his record, which hasn't moved a centimetre. "Even the shortest-lived star lives longer than the longest lived person. Wuss."

"What?"

"I can look forward, too," he says. "That one right there is going to collapse into, what do you call it, a neutron star." He points at another one. "That's going to be a white dwarf. You're going to sit here for literally twenty billion years and not worry whether _anyone_ misses you." 

"I can look back!" Aradia says, suddenly furious with herself and at the timeline for shoving her together with the only other person in this universe, this whole universe, who has the same powers as her and can just maybe understand--"And I don't think anyone but you appreciates your hand-holding."

"You should come back," Dave says. He does a good job of not flinching.

"You should stay out here," she says, "with me. It's peaceful."

And then the timeline lets her go. She's free to leave him and bounce to the other end of the universe, to the very opposite end of time, and let him try and catch her. He won't give chase if she runs. 

Aradia stays exactly where she is. 

"Hey," he says. "I bet you and me together could speed up time better than either of us could do it alone. Knight and Maid?"

"We haven't been either of those things for a long time," Aradia says. "Most of us never got to be."

"We could fast forward through the nebula, and then through the whole ride back to the planet. You've never even seen the people we made." 

"No," Aradia says, shakily. "Maybe."

"You don't have to stick around, weirdo. You make a melody," he says, steadying a turntable. "I'll keep the beat. Count of three--"


End file.
